. 59 







Hollinger 

pH 8.5 

Mill Run P03-2193 



AMERICA'S DEBT TO 
ENGLAND 



int rHiLurct iu ic«tn int 
FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERTY 


4*\ 






BY 




LUCIUS B. SWIFT 





OF THE INDIANAPOLIS BAR 



READ BEFORE THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL 

ASSOCIATION, CINCINNATI, DEC. 28, 1916 

(now extended and revised) 



PRICE lO CENTS 



THE KAUTZ STATIONERY CO. 

INDIANAPOLIS 

1917 



*i\ 



By the Same Author 

Germans In America 

LUCIUS B. SWIFT 

OF THE INDIANAPOLIS BAR 

Read Before the Indianapolis Literary Club 
October 4, 1915. 

First Edition, 5,000, November, 1915. 

Second Edition, 10,000, January, 1916. 
Third Edition, 15.000, July, 1916. 

Fourth Edition, 10,000, August, 1916. 

Price, Ten Cents 

THE KAUTZ STATIONERY CO. 

INDIANAPOLIS 



AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND. 



The human aspect of this country has changed from 
what it was in August, 1914, and for many months 
following the outbreak of the war. The voice of the 
peace at any price advocates headed by Mr. Bryan is 
silent, and Mr. Bryan offers himself for enlistment 
as a private. Yet up to a very recent date he had a 
following made up of men and women who sang, "I 
didn't raise my boy to be a soldier," and who 
fought hard to make us, by staying at home ourselves 
and by keeping our ships at home, submit to the 
domination of the Kaiser now, instead of waiting for 
his final victory. They were indifferent to the fate of 
liberty in the world and they daily gave thanks that 
we were not at war; though to keep out of the risk 
of war we had suffered national shame and humilia- 
tion. Their aggregate was large and they seemed 
dead to patriotism ; they seemed ready to give up 
self-government and pass under the yoke of any con- 
queror who came provided they might live their own 
limp existence unharmed. Nothing but a course, 
under a conqueror, of slow devilish torture, such as 

Three 



triumphant German efficiency has inflicted upon the 
people of Belgium for nearly three years, will make 
them believe that liberty is worth fighting for. I am 
thankful that I was born under different stars and 
have the hallowed recollection of a different mother. 
We have not heard the last of them. Peace at any 
price has existed in all ages. It has always been a 
refuge for traitors and, while it Avould be far from 
true to say that every peace at any price man is a 
traitor, it is true that every traitor in America today 
is a peace at any price man. 

Then we had various groups of socialists who ap- 
parently had never heard of Anglo-Saxon principles 
and who thought that the only need of the world was 
what they called economic liberty. They preached 
that there should be no such thing as patriotism and 
some of them notified the country that they would 
not serve in any war. Today their voice is dumb and 
they stand at the parting of the ways. 

We had also a multitude of men busy with money- 
making who wanted to squeeze through and preserve 
their gains and they ignored the war and passed by on 
the other side, not heeding the call of liberty. They 
were silent then and they are silent now, but in greatly 
diminished numbers. 

Four 



We had labor bodies that with seemingly unsur- 
passed selfishness thought that whatever the crisis of 
civil liberty, the demands and laws of labor came 
first. They were like the labor bodies in England 
at the beginning of the war. But in England a revolu- 
tion took place ; patriotism resumed its own, and labor 
with noble sacrifice marched in step with all Britain. 
Today in America all is changed. On every hand 
workingmen are raising the Stars and Stripes, and 
the most powerful labor bodies declare in noble words 
their devotion to the principles upon which this 
government is founded. 

We had a class larger than all of the other classes 
together made up of those who, moved by a passive 
dislike of England, looked on with indifference 
at whatever might happen to her in this war. 
They had no English-speaking-race patriotism. That 
this feeling was widespread is plain from the fact 
that outside of leading magazines and newspapers — in 
fact in the bulk of public prints read by the American 
people — there rarely appeared generous and unstinted 
praise of England. 

There is no doubt that in the course of a century, 
at critical moments, the British government was not 
sympathetic. When I was discharged from the Union 

Five 



Army in June, 1865, 1 never expected to forgive the 
South; yet I retain today no hatred of the South and, 
while I am glad that I shall never be able to say that 
she was right, I take an American pride in her deeds 
of valor. My feeling toward the South is the feeling 
of the North generally. Could hostile feeling be more 
thoroughly obliterated? Fifty years and less have 
done this work. 

Nor did I ever expect to forgive England for 
sympathizing with the South. But later I came to 
remember that Lancashire starved without complaint 
when we cut off the cotton supply. I read the words 
of John Bright, that when in our civil war British 
officials "were hostile or coldly neutral the British 
people clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust." 
I came to understand that both in the civil war and 
in the Revolution the English government for the 
moment was not the English people. I came to learn 
of the battles which the English people had fought 
for the development and establishment of Anglo- 
Saxon rights and of the great reward of their victories 
which we had reaped, which I had not before learned 
from lack of proper teaching in the schools. I also 
learned how finally in the Spanish war her diplomacy 
kept at bay the diplomacy of Germany; and at last 

Six 



with the frankest and the most open good-will, without 
request, she ranged her ships and guns with ours in 
Manila Bay. Is not the score at least balanced? A 
great and increasing number of Americans today 
answer that it is. 

The greatest apparent change of all has taken 
place among Americans of German birth or descent. 
Taking them the country over, when the Kaiser drew 
the sword they seemed to rise as one man to back 
him up. Led by professors, German and American, 
they sounded the praises of Kaiser-Germanism and 
descendants of 48-ers joined in. They believed 
that the war would be over in a few months and that 
the Kaiser would win, and they were glad. They 
urged the superior merit of the German cause on every 
hand; they promoted the sale of German bonds; to 
objections to autocracy they pointed out its efficiency, 
and they had no criticism to make of the invasion of 
Belgium. They were passionate and imperious, and 
displayed a zeal which showed that they believed in 
the German government. In fact they wanted the 
Kaiser to win and they took no thought of the effect 
upon Anglo-Saxon ideals of liberty. Of course there 
were those opposed to all this, but with rare exceptions 
they kept silent. Today Americans generally of 

Seven 



German birth or descent declare themselves united 
behind the Stars and Stripes against the Kaiser. I 
shall not attempt to state what has brought about 
this change. If it is simply the performance of a 
duty required by law while retaining every one of 
their former opinions, then their hearts are not yet 
right. If they agree with the president of the Ger- 
man-American Alliance of Ohio who says that all 
German- Americans are with America against Germany 
but that they hope for the defeat of the Allies of 
whom America is one, then they are not yet Americans. 
But if the Kaiser's ruthlessness, if such acts as the 
sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Edith Cavell 
and Captain Fryatt, the enslavement of over 150,000 
Belgians, the desolation of Prance, the brazen hoisting 
of the black flag of the pirate and the frightful dis- 
play by the German General Staff of will and power 
to do these things in the face of civilization have 
convinced German-Americans that civilization cannot 
remain half democracy and half autocracy and that 
democracy is the only promise of a peaceful world, 
and if they have planted themselves upon President 
Wilson's war message which embodies the whole of 
freedom and if they have accepted every word of it, 
l hen their action is a great day for America. 

Eight 



These various classes, the spiritless peace at any 
price advocates, groups of socialists, money-makers, 
labor bodies, English haters, and Americans of Ger- 
man origin were not at first in unison with the great 
body of Americans as to this war. I now come to the 
question why they existed at all ; why were the people 
in Germany hypnotized into a unit behind a medieval 
autocracy menacing civilization itself while the people 
in America were not united under one of the best 
governments the world has ever seen? 

The issues have been plain. On the autocratic side, 
the government of the Kaiser was framed up on the 
German people by Bismarck, the most powerful, the 
most determined, and the most outspoken enemy of 
free government the last century produced. He fixed 
that government to run upon the Prussian principle of 
absolutism. He meant it to be a one-man government 
and in active operation it so proved. He gave it certain 
constitutional forms, but the definition of the noted 
German historian Gneist that it was ' ' absolutism under 
constitutional forms" holds good. That style of gov- 
ernment in Germany runs back many centuries to the 
times when the free and independent German tribes 
lost their liberties. The German people have known 
no other kind of government so long that the mind of 
man "runneth not to the contrary." 

Nine 



For the last five hundred years the Hohenzollern 
family have been the peculiarly efficient exponent of 
absolute government. Its members have enjoyed one- 
man rule and have encouraged those classes whose 
help could be counted upon to continue it, like the 
present military caste, the descendants of the Teutonic 
Knights. Frederick the Great advised his nephew 
to "magnify the army." Every act and word of the 
Kaiser from the first day of his reign show that he 
believes this to be the best kind of government. If 
he should extend his territory from Berlin to Bagdad 
and should become the dominating power in the world, 
he would have no thought of making any use whatever 
of Anglo-Saxon principles of government. For proof 
of this we have only to look at the bogus reforms 
which, hard pressed, he now promises, after the war. 
If the promised reforms were genuine the promise 
would be tainted by the Hohenzollern blood. The 
Hohenzollern of the time of the battle of Leipsic and 
all of the the other kings and princes of Germany and 
Austria promised the German people that if they 
would rise in arms and put down Bonaparte, then 
they should have a share in their government, and 
after Bonaparte was put down they renewed the 
promise in writing and then every man of them broke 
his royal word. 

Ten 



It was plain from the start that the triumph of 
the Kaiser would greatly strengthen the idea of abso- 
lute government and would make his government 
dominant in the world. It would not be slow to 
exercise a practical dictatorship which would paralyze 
democratic government everywhere or would put it, 
especially America, into a desperate struggle for 
existence. Reading the thousand or more speeches 
which the Kaiser had made, it was plain that he would 
be such a dictator. He would feel that at last he had 
realized his hope expressed in 1900 at the dedication 
of the corner stone of the Imperial Limes Museum 
which stands upon the Roman wall extending from 
the Rhine to the Danube : "I dedicate it to our Ger- 
man Fatherland, to which I hope it will be granted 
. to become in the future as closely united, 
as powerful, and as authoritative as once the Roman 

world-empire was "It was safe to 

conclude that if the Kaiser had the power, he would 
teach the world, as he told his soldiers to teach China- 
men, "never again to look askance upon a German." 
The coercion of the French Republic by the German 
government to dismiss a cabinet officer because he 
was obnoxious to the Kaiser is a mild specimen of 
what would follow victory for the Kaiser now. 

Eleven 



America would refuse to bow to that coercion and 
would fight — alone. 

From the beginning it was evident that the first 
object of the Kaiser's government was to break up 
the British Empire. It meant to destroy England's 
sea power and reduce her to the condition of Holland. 
This had been the Kaiser's object for years and it 
was understood and applauded long before the begin- 
ning of the war by German sympathizers all over the 
world, including America, under the lead of Muenster- 
burg. The pursuit of this object by war was from 
the start accompanied by methods of warfare which 
the world looked upon with horror and anger. The 
excuse is a fight for existence; but that so-called 
existence does not concern the future happiness and 
prosperity of the German people. The only existence 
in danger is the Hohenzollem and his absolute govern- 
ment. Even to avoid defeat, the prize-fighter will 
not strike below the belt, but the Kaiser misjudged 
his antagonists and the world and defiantly broke the 
rule. He has raised the black flag. His hand is 
against every man and every man's hand must be 
against him. There can be but one result; he who 
runs amuck is apt to do a good deal of damage, but 
in the end, he is brought down. For two years and 

Ttrefve 



eight months this autocracy has paralyzed the ordinary 
life of all nations. With the invasion of Belgium it 
attempted to overthrow faith in treaties, with its 
cruelty and murder and desolation and black flag it 
has put in the shade all invaders of all time. To 
paraphrase President Wilson, while this autocracy 
exists the world is not safe for democracy. 

Let us now look at the democratic side of the issue. 
Although we took little notice of them, we had in 
America at the beginning of the war a body of Anglo- 
Saxon rights such as representative government, trial 
by jury, no taxation without representation, free 
speech, a free press, habeas corpus, the right of peti- 
tion, the right of protest, the right of public assembly 
and many other rights which make a people free. The 
beginning of the growth of this body of rights was 
1,500 years ago at the beginning of the Dark Ages 
and all through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages 
and in modern times down to the Abolition of Slavery 
in our own times those rights have been held and 
created and added to by the English-speaking race. 
They did not come like summer breezes. Most of them 
came in storm and stress. The autocrat is always and 
everywhere. He did his best to master the English- 
speaking race and he failed. For many centuries 

Thirteen 



Anglo-Saxon skies resounded with combat for liberty. 

"Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey goose wing 
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the king." 

The German in Germany learned nothing of this, 
During all those centuries, liberty was dumb in Ger- 
many; the only sound was the sound of the glory of 
a ruler passing by. The German who lands upon the 
shores of America today finds here that liberty the 
germ of which his ancestors in the German forests 
had and lost and which the Angles, the Saxons and 
the Jutes carried into England and handed down to 
us. That German ought to cry out, "At last I am 
home again! I here enjoy the full growth of that 
liberty which was lost in Germany but which the 
English-speaking race with its strong arm has pre- 
served for all the modern world ! " No other race has 
such a record. Other races have their own reasons 
for pride but this record is the peculiar and the 
crowning glory of the English-speaking race. 

When the shock of this war came, France who at a 
vital moment helped us to gain our independence 
and who now stands among the foremost of civilized 
democracies made head against it. With her was 
England, absolutely controlled by the will of her 

Fourteen 



people and who had built for us most of the founda- 
tions of the remarkable and well ordered liberty and 
self government we now enjoy. From her had spread 
over the world those powerful guarantors of freedom, 
Anglo-Saxon rights; but in the development and 
spread of those rights the descendants of the ancient 
Britons found in language and blood in the Welsh 
of Wales, and the descendants of the ancient Picte 
found in the Scotch in Scotland and the descendants 
of the ancient Hibernians found in the Irish in Ireland 
had all contributed their share. In any praise given 
to the spread of Anglo-Saxon rights we cannot leave 
out the Anglo-Celt or the Anglo-Pict. 

The first questions which ought to have come into 
the mind of America was "What if the Kaiser should 
win? Standing at the head of a victorious army, his 
treasury bursting with war indemnities, with France 
bled white as he promised and England reduced to the 
condition of Holland, where will be left a battle 
ground for liberty except here in America, and who 
mil be left to fight that battle except America alone?" 
The answer to these questions should have been that 
the allies were not only fighting the battle of democ- 
racy against absolutism but that they were fighting 
our battle and that not only patriotism but self- 
Fifteen 



interest called upon us to throw in our whole strength 
upon their side. 

I shall not go over with recrimination the long period 
which elapsed before we took our stand against this 
enemy of mankind. My thankfulness is too great 
that at last my country is to suffer and sacrifice in 
the cause of the liberty of the world and not leave the 
battle to be won by others while we only gather in 
the profits of the struggle. 

I shall confine myself to a single question when 
the mighty issue of this war loomed up before us what 
was the failure on our part which not only raised up 
the multitude of slackers in the defense of Anglo- 
Saxon rights composed of the classes I have named 
but made the whole country so slow in comprehending 
the danger to its institutions? There is only one 
answer. We have never even named the foundations 
of their liberty to American youth. Much less have 
we told them the story of the storms which for cen- 
turies raged around the building of those foundations, 
nor of the blood and sacrifice and suffering which went 
into the construction; and we have never mentioned 
the subject to immigrant citizens. Autocratic govern- 
ments impress upon their subjects the virtues of 
emperors and kings and princes to cement allegiance. 

Sixteen 



We do not even take the trouble to bring to American 
citizens the knowledge of the history of the rights 
which make them free. If we did it would become a 
religion arousing all Americans at any sign of danger. 

If you ask the inhabitants of America what are the 
foundations of the liberty they enjoy, a great majority 
will name the American Revolution only. For this 
situation I blame the schools and particularly the 
grades below the high school because more than three- 
fourths of American youth never reach the high 
school. For more than a century we have brought 
up American children to hate England and this has 
led us to slur over the history of those foundations of 
our liberty which rest upon English soil. 

We send the children out to form public opinion 
founded upon ignorance and prejudice, and this in a 
crisis is an opinion dangerous to the welfare of the 
country. For more than a century we have in effect 
taught each generation of children that Lexington, 
Concord and Bunker Hill were the beginning of all 
liberty; and after hearing us talk our immigrant 
citizens have come to the same conclusion. 

Let me say at once that whatever we have taught, 
the importance of the Revolution itself will never 
diminish. The Fathers fought for the rights of Eng- 

Seventeen 



lishmen and Avon. They not only secured to us im- 
perishable blessings but they freed every English 
colony from a selfish colonial policy; and their action 
inspired the people of the civilized world to examine 
into their own rights. This examination caused a 
realization of wrongs which set the world ablaze, first 
in the French Revolution, and again in the continental 
uprisings in 1848 — the one leading by painful steps 
to the self-governed France of today, the others done 
to death by the bayonets of autocracy. 

Our Revolution and our Abolition of Slavery were 
indeed major foundations of American liberty and 
they are America's noble contribution to the list. But 
other battles had been fought and won, in the cen- 
turies past, which educated and inspired our Fathers 
and made them master builders to build these two 
American Foundations. The results of those other 
victories lie in the midst of us and yet unseen ; genera- 
tions come and go in happiness because of 
"Ancient right unnoticed as the breath we draw." 

Let me refer briefly to some of those ancient rights 
and how they were won and how they have been for- 
gotten and why. 

Americans are as familiar with elections as with 
the alphabet. They see the representatives of the 

Eighteen 



people, chosen in various ways, go to their duties in 
every direction, from township officers to the president 
and congress; from the justice of the peace to the 
supreme court of the United States. We do not stop 
to consider that this representative government is vital 
to American liberty and that without it, we should 
pass under the yoke of arbitrary rule. Knowledge of 
its origin and history can alone make us comprehend 
our debt, No youth should leave school without 
knowing that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers carried 
representative government from the forests of Ger- 
many into England ; how it nourished in the hundred- 
moot, the shire-moot and the folk-moot ; how all gov- 
ernment was laid prostrate for the moment by William 
the Conqueror; how starting again with the Great 
Council of the Norman Kings, the people of England 
slowly against their kings built up a more and more 
representative government, which developed into the 
English Parliament and the American Congress of 
today ; how the people of England drove to the block 
and to exile their kings who would rule in defiance of 
their laws and without the representatives of the 
people in parliament assembled ; and finally how our 
English Fathers came and planted representative gov- 
ernment upon the shores of America ; how ever since, 



Nineteen 



those who had known only the hand of a ruler have 
come here and have been permitted to enjoy the 
ancient Anglo-Saxon right of joining in the choice of 
representatives of the people and so have become 
rulers themselves. 

We settle our disputes by courts. These were not 
invented by Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson. 
I would have children taught that they are not new; 
that they were not granted by any king; that they 
were present in the elements which produced the 
Anglo-Saxon race. The village-moot, the hundred- 
moot and the folk-moot were all courts. In all of 
those courts disputes were settled according to the 
customs as stated by the elder-men. This was the 
making of the common law. After six hundred years 
William the Conqueror and his successors built upon 
this Anglo-Saxon foundation the courts which have 
developed into the English and American courts of 
today. The recorded decisions of those courts century 
after century gave shape to the magnificent structure 
of the common law, the customs of the people, which 
had been growing from the earliest ages at a pace 
equal to the task of protecting the lives, the liberty, 
and the property of the people. When the Cavaliers 
and the Puritans came, they did not have to invent a 

Twenty 



system of courts or enact a body of law ; they brought 
both with them from England and they are here today. 
To teach this history to American boys and girls is 
simply to prepare them to be ordinarily intelligent 
citizens. 

In every county seat in the country is the court- 
house. American youth are familiar with the twelve 
seats for the jurymen, but beyond that they know 
little. No one teaches them the venerable origin of 
those twelve seats ; that the germ of the jury appeared 
in France; that the Normans found it there and 
carried it into England 850 years ago; that it died 
out on the continent, to 1 be revived in later centurias 
but that England seized upon and developed it until, 
in the fourteenth century, it came to its full growth 
when "twelve good men and true" were put into the 
jury seats and sworn to "a true verdict give." This 
was a new way to enforce an old right. Already, for 
many centuries, the Anglo-Saxon, in the hundred- 
moot, the folk-moot and the shire-moot, had had the 
right of trial by his equals, and Magna Charta had 
already registered that right in the declaration that 
no freeman should be proceeded against except by the 
"legal judgment of his peers." 

No one has seen the jurymen rise from their seats, 

Twenty.one 



at the end of the evidence in a murder trial, and 
slowly file out to decide in privacy the question of 
life or death, without a feeling of awe; but when we 
add to this the fact that for six hundred years these 
twelve men have been a shield of justice protecting the 
weakest of the community, then what was common- 
place becomes glorified. Which is better, to have no 
impression whatever of trial by jury, except that we 
have it, or to make the heart- swell Avith pride by the 
knowledge that, for 1500 years, every Anglo-Saxon 
has had the right of trial by his equals, and that all 
who come from all parts of the world enter here into 
the enjoyment of this ancient right as a free gift? 

Americans have no vivid picture of the mighty 
drama of Magna Charta; of the English people de- 
manding that a written record be made of their 
centuries-old rights. And when it was written and 
presented to John Lackland, he answered, "I will 
never grant such liberties as will make me a slave." 
And England rose in arms and confronted John, and 
then he signed. And the next day he was in arms 
against what he had signed and brought over foreign 
troops. And the history of England for the next 
eighty years is the history of the struggle for the 
enforcement of the charter. At last, Edward I, before 

Twenty-two 



all the people in Westminster Hall, burst into tears 
and admitted that he was wrong; and while later 
kings evaded the charter, not one denied that is was 
the law. When this picture is unfolded before 
American youth and when they read the words written 
seven hundred years ago: "We will not go against 
any man nor send against him save by the legal judg- 
ment of his peers or by the law of the land," then 
they will realize that their right to live in full enjoy- 
ment of the liberty guaranteed by those words was 
established by an immortal struggle: and that when 
our Fathers came to America, no matter from what 
country, they stepped at once into full enjoyment of 
that right, We cannot afford not to have that fact 
and the picture of that struggle indelibly written 
upon the mind of every boy and girl in America. 

Some months ago a man was locked up in Indian- 
apolis upon the charge of loitering. He had not 
loitered, but the police, suspecting him to be a crim- 
inal, made this charge to keep him in jail while they 
looked up his record. By command of the judge the 
sheriff brought the man into our circuit court in order 
that the lawfulness of his detention might be deter- 
mined. The court found the detention unlawful and 
the prisoner was set free. This is the process of 

Twenty-three 



habeas corpus and it is so familiar and so matter-of- 
fact that we have forgotten that we owe anybody 
anything for it. 

Americans never stop to think that from the earliest 
records of the English law running back centuries no 
freeman could be rightfully detained in prison except 
by the legal judgment of his peers ; and when Magna 
Charta so declared, it only declared what had always 
been the law. Nevertheless in the face of Magna 
Charta the king claimed the right to put a man in 
prison and keep him there and give no reason; and 
the claim was sustained by a cringing court. Then 
began a new struggle lasting 464 years, through the 
Planta genet, the Tudor, and into the Stuart line from 
Magna Charta to 1679. During all those centuries, 
the king laid his hand upon men and cast them into 
prison. Three hundred years after the Charter eleven 
judges filed a protest against imprisonment by order 
of noblemen ; but they admitted that Elizabeth might 
send men to prison at her own will. The fight went 
on and a later court held that the order of Charles I 
was enough to deprive a man of his liberty; and 
men like John Hampden looked out from behind 
prison bars. Still the fight went on until in the second 
parliament after the Restoration, in 1679, the English 

Twenty-four 



people, again in possesion of their government, de- 
clared that not even the King's order could stand 
against the writ of habeas corpus. When the writ of 
habeas corpus was mentioned in our constitution in 
1789, it was not denned ; it needed no definition. The 
makers of the constitution knew what this bulwark 
of their liberty had cost; but we do not teach it to 
American youth. 

Americans do know that we fought the American 
Revolution with "no taxation without representation" 
as our leading war-cry; but they never think of the 
struggle of the English people through many cen- 
turies to settle it that they should not be taxed except 
by law which they had a hand in making. Yet with- 
out the example of that fight before them our Revolu- 
tionary Fathers would never have thought of raising 
objection to the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax. Ameri- 
cans do not realize that when five hundred years after 
the Conqueror, Henry VIII, in 1525, without law 
levied a tax of one-tenth of every man's substance, 
and when the people rich and poor cursed the King's 
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, as "the subverter of their 
laws and liberties" and rose in insurrection, and when 
Henry, bull-dog though he was, had to back down and 
pay back, the English people were in the midst of a 

Twenty-five 



battle which never ended until Cornwallis surrendered 
at Yorktown. 

Here we find the man not afraid to stand alone — to 
make the one-man fight. Twenty years later Henry 
called for voluntary contributions but fixed the 
amount each man had to pay. Alderman Reed re- 
fused and was put into the army as a soldier on the 
Scotch border at his own charge, with orders to be 
put to the hardest and most perilous duty; he was 
captured by the Scots and had to pay more for his 
ransom than the gift to the King amounted to ; but 
he made his fight and here is his name on the roll of 
those who have advanced the cause of self-government. 
Charles I, in 1627, called upon each man to make him 
a loan. Two hundred country gentlemen were clapped 
into irons for refusing and were shifted from prison 
to prison to break their spirit. Dr. Mainwaring 
preached before Charles that the King needed no" 
parliamentary warrant for taxation, and that to resist 
his will was to incur eternal damnation. John Hamp- 
den, one of the richest commoners in England, an- 
swered that he could lend the money but he feared 
the curse named in Magna Charta for its violation ; 
and he was sent back into close confinement. 

Again, the Petition of Right said that no man 

Twenty-six 



should be taxed except by law of parliament, and 
Charles agreed to it. Then he levied tonnage and 
poundage. Parliament denounced it and was ad- 
journed by the King. Merchants refused to pay but 
the courts decided against them. Parliament came 
back furious and Charles dissolved it. Richard 
Chambers refused to pay. Summoned before the King 
in Council, he told them in their teeth that not even 
in Turkey were merchants so wrung as in England. 
The Star Chamber fined him two thousand pounds 
and ordered him to make humble submission. He was 
a Puritan. He refused and was sent to prison ; and 
for three hundred years his name has been on the 
roll of patriots. 

In 1636 Charles ordered ship-money collected and 
the highest court decided that no statute prohibiting 
arbitrary taxation could be pleaded against the King's 
will. But notwithstanding courts and kings we always 
find the English people facing the King with the 
declaration that they cannot be legally taxed without 
their own consent, and long before the American 
Revolution they had won the victory. 

George III and his packed and corrupted parlia- 
ment, which did not represent the people, proposed 
to tax America. Our Fathers, mindful of the cen- 

Twenty-seven 



turies-old struggle which, the English people had won, 
answered the proposal to tax them with a demand for 
the rights which Englishmen enjoyed in England; 
and for those rights they fought. And from whatever 
country our Fathers came that was the fight. La- 
Fayette and Muhlenberg and Herkimer and Steuben 
and Kalb and Pulaski and Kosciusko did not fight for 
the rights of the French in France nor of the Ger- 
mans in Germany, nor for the Poles in Poland but 
they fought for the rights which Englishmen had 
won for themselves in England and which as part of 
the English empire were our heritage, along with the 
common law, trial by jury and habeas corpus. And 
this was Washington's opinion. "American freedom," 
he said, "is at stake; it seems highly necessary that 
something should be done to avert the stroke and 
maintain the liberty which we have derived from our 
ancestors. ' ' 

In the New York farm house in which I was born, 
great beams hewn from forest trees outlined the foun- 
dations; these were the sills. Other hewn timbers 
extended across from side to side, a few inches apart ; 
those were the sleepers. This massive foundation, 
which a hundred years have not shaken, is all unseen, 
unless you go into the cellar. American children have 

Twenty-eight 



never been taken into the cellar of their political 
history where they might see the sills and the sleepers 
which are the foundations of the marvelous and well- 
ordered liberty which they enjoy today. If they had 
been, the first gun of this war would have warned a 
united people of the danger to democracy. It is time 
to begin ; and when the children ask who built these 
foundations of free speech, free press, right of peti- 
tion, trial by jury and all the rest, with the two 
American exceptions, there can be only one answer — 
England. And when they ask, what of England 
today, they will have to be told that when George 
III was trying to conquer us, the English people, led 
by Chatham and Burke and Fox, were struggling for 
the same ideals we were fighting for; and that what 
we won by the sword they won against the same 
enemy by years of political struggle until England 
stands today the government most responsive to the 
will of the people. And when they ask what race 
has preserved these foundations and spread civil 
liberty over the world, the answer will have to be — the 
English-speaking race. 

In teaching history it is essential to be truthful for 
truth's sake; but it is equally essential that all im- 
migrant citizens as well as native born Americans 

Twenty-nine 



realize the struggle and the sacrifices of the hundreds 
of years consumed in building up the Anglo-Saxon 
foundations of liberty upon which the government of 
civilized democracy rests today. Knowing its history 
they will recognize the vast heritage of civil liberty 
which they here enjoy; and that that heritage was 
not built up by America alone, but is the common 
work of the English-speaking race. They will feel in 
their inmost souls that democratic government is a 
pearl without price and will view with the deepest 
anxiety and place before everj'thing else the danger 
of its being shaken or checked in the world and with 
their backs to the wall will resist every kind of 
encroachment upon it. And now the call has come. 
Let no one be persuaded that there will be a greater 
issue for America in some later war witli some other 
nation. The issue of freedom for the world is here 
and must be settled on this battlefield. 



Thirty 



"America's Debt to England" as originally written was 
read before the American Historical Association at Cin- 
cinnati, December 28, 1916, and appeared in the April, 
1917 number of the Educational Review under the title, 
"Failure to Teach the Foundations of Liberty". It then 
embraced the part indicated by that title. Since then it 
has gradually been extended and revised to its present 
limits to keep pace with the progress of events and in the 
meantime it has been read before the following: 

The Indianapolis Bar Association. 

The Indiana Dental College. 

The Indianapolis Literary Club. 

The Indianapolis Law School. 

The Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington. 

The Engineers' Club of Indianapolis. 

The History Club of Indiana University at Bloomington. 

The General Arthur St. Clair Chapter of the Daughters 
of the American Revolution. 

The Brotherhood of the First Baptist Church of Indian- 
apolis. 

Indianapolis, May 1, 1917. 



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